Colin Chambers

The previous url for the Snapshot files was on a temporary host. East Carolina University have expressed their interest in this project and have begun working closely with us. They have provided a more permanent host for the snapshot files at http://hawk.aos.ecu.edu/mobilemoodle/introduction.html

Please go to the introduction.html file as written above. Firefox no longer redirects from the index.html at http://hawk.aos.ecu.edu/mobilemoodle/ for some reason. We'll address this in the next snapshot

Hi Everyone,

We’ve been working feverishly and now have a snapshot of theuser interface to be used for synchronisation. It is still very much a work inprogress but is beginning to take shape. Hopefully this will give others anidea of how we are intending to tackle the process. You can access the snapshot at http://webfc1.open.ac.uk/~colin_chambers_2/shares/Offline%20Moodle/Snapshots/introduction.html.

We have also provided a few more diagrams along with thelatest version of our continually improving Specification document to helpeveryone understand where we are heading. We have begun to get more and moreinterest which is great to see. Hopefully the release of this snapshot willgive you all something to get your teeth into.

So what is a snapshot you ask? Well simply put we want toprovide an ultra realistic vision of the interface Moodle will get to enablesynchronisation. It’s extremely realistic because it’s provided in exactly thesame way Moodle is i.e. via a web browser, and uses all the same components.The only difference is that it is not dynamic i.e. it is not hosted on a webservice and it doesn’t actually manage anything .

So if it works in your browser it will work in the realthing and vice versa. You are welcome to pass this url to anyone you want totest it. The files are available in a zip, so if you need an offline versionjust get in touch. So now is your opportunity to really get involved and give us some feedback.

• Tell us the key features we’re missing.
• Tell us if it’s accessible/usable.
• Tell us if you would/ would not use it.
• And above all tell us how to improve it.

If you need to contact me my email address is c.chambers@open.ac.uk

Hi Hugues,

Your question is quite far ranging so I will try to answer it from a couple of angles.

At a basic level our work on synchronising the Forum activity module from client to server has required synchronisation of related blocks. In this context Blocks provide discrete sections in the moodle interface often used to provide summary information for courses or modules. They provide little in the way of interactivity that needs to be synchronised except for configuration information, for example the block title and its position. Modules, including activity and resource modules, often provide many tools for interactivity and thus lots of information to synchronise.

To ensure the client project does not interfere with current work our aim is to provide an object oriented synchronisation interface that is extremely simple and efficient for developers to use. However it will not be mandatory for blocks or modules to implement and support the synchronisation feature.

Perhaps this question can also be answered by this excerpt from our technical documentation:

The overall requirement is that after a synchronisation session the databases on the servers must be identical at the record level for the items that were synchronised. This will ease the management of the servers and assist in determining the source of a problem by comparing the records on each server.

We hope this answers your question Hugues.

Also, I knew I had it somewhere. Here is a link to the repository APi spec on the wiki. http://docs.moodle.org/en/Repository_API. It should tell you how things have moved on.

We are working on a repository implementation at the Open University that sounds like what you're after. Thanh Le is heading the project and has a post at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=43689 . Our version is specific to the Documentum repository we are using. The general discussion for DMS is i believe now at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?f=352 as the intention is to have a general repository api with many drivers for various implementations.